Communications in Science. Ladies first?

Posted on November 22nd, 2010

Since 2009 NT-MDT Co. has been holding the contest of scientific art images obtained by atomic force microscopes (AFM). Each month researchers from the entire world submit their AFM scans which then are exposed to online voting procedure. Any IP-address is allowed to send one vote a day. Before sending the vote the letter-code has to be entered manually, so the automated voting is excluded.

The only way for a contestant to increase his/her scan rating significantly is to mobilize social networks for regular voting for one particular image.

Simple gender analysis of monthly-tour winners shows that:

a) the percentage of women has been rising for two years;b) women can attract more social networks votes.

There were six monthly-tour winners of the ProImage Contest 2009 (www.ntmdt-tips.com/gallery/contest2009.html) and two of them were ladies (Gisem Durak, Turkey and Olga Yermolaeva, Russia).

So the ratio F to M among winners was 1:2 in first three months. But the ratio among all of participants in 2009 was much lower - 13:38 or 1:3!

52 persons (34 men and 18 women) have already participated in the ProImage Contest 2010. So the ratio is F:M = 1:2. By now the winners are ladies only!

The competition in September voting was quite interesting. Ms. Iuliana Stoica from Romania and Mr. Artem Rasvodov from Russia went avoice to voice keeping an intrigue up to the last hour. Both of them attracted a lot of social network contacts. But finally Ms. Iuliana won (photos, above).

In the October voting two Russian science-ladies competed with each other so strongly that left the other contestants far-far behind. Stella Kutrovskaya became a winner.

According to the NT-MDT statistics the most exploited network in US and Europe is "facebook.com", and in Russia - "vkontakte.ru". "LinkedIn.com" and "Libero.it" have been registered as well.

To be correct, the estimation procedure relies not only on the online voting. The Top-10 images from each tour of go to the final tour where the ProIMAGE Contest international jury will choose the best ones. Thus the art features will play greater role than the social contacts in the final round. Nevertheless the revealed phenomenon of higher on-line communication skills among science-ladies is rather interesting. One can suppose that the new information and communication media fast development will change soon the science community landscape as a whole and the positions of women in science are expected to be changed as well.

P.S. There are few days left to the 30th of November - the last deadline for sending scans for the December tour. Register here and send your scan or just visit the gallery and vote for the best images.